ASUS has two new Core 2 compatible motherboards. The first is the new P5W DH Deluxe which is catered towards the digital home market. Built around the Intel 975X and ICH7R core-logic the P5W DH Deluxe isn’t a board you’d find in consumer form factor or small form factor home theater PC’s. With the backing of the 975X and ICH7R core logic the P5W DH Deluxe packs support for ATI CrossFire via two half speed PCI Express x16 slots, two PCI Express x1, and three PCI slots.

There's also plenty of SATA II connections with seven connections—three from the ICH7R, two from the JMicron JMB363, and two from a Silicon Image controller. Strangely enough ASUS only implements three of the four supported SATA ports from the ICH7R, though support for RAID 0, 1, and 5 is still retained. The JMicron JMB363 serves double duty as the e.SATA controller and secondary IDE controller for those that have more than two IDE devices.

Networking features are plentiful with two Gigabit and wireless LAN support. The Gigabit Ethernet will most likely be provided by a Marvell 88E8052/88E8053 based controller like other Asus boards. Topping off the feature list is high definition 8-channel audio, though no mention of which codec will be used. It wouldn’t be too surprising to see the Realtek ALC882D used as Asus touts Dolby Digital Live, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, Dolby Headphone, and Dolby Virtual Speaker support. Additional features include a remote, Asus EZ-Backup, Asus WiFi-AP Solo, and Asus MP3-In.

The second board is the P965 and ICH8R based P5B Deluxe. This board supports DDR2-800—a feature the 975X core logic lacks. ATI CrossFire support is questionable at this point, though the board does have two PCI Express x16 slots with one operating in x2 or x4 modes. As far as features go the P5B Deluxe is pretty similar to the P5W DH Deluxe. There are six SATA II ports powered by the ICH8R and a JMicron JMB363 powering e.SATA and a secondary IDE channel. There’s also dual Gigabit LAN powered by two Marvell controllers and Wireless LAN. Audio is upgraded a bit with an Analog Devices high definition audio codec with support for DTS Connect.

Yes, the chipset and socket work the same as they did under netbusrt, the only change will the additional power and pathing you find with core. But depending on the processor the board will have to adjust certain functions, which are probably optimized for core, and netburst is sort of an afterthought.

Actually, since this is the 975X chipset, it would be more appropriate to say that Core is the afterthough. This chipset was originally designed for NetBurst CPU's, namely the 900 series Extreme Editions. The 965 boards were made for Core, (like the P5B) so it would be more correct to say that those are the boards where NetBurst will play 2nd fiddle.